Mexico’s Obrador Bets on Lula-Style Makeover to Close Voter Gap

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, former mayor of Mexico City and presidential candidate in 2006, speaks at a news conference to announce he will run again for president, in Mexico City on Nov. 15, 2011. Photographer: Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was
opposed by Mexico’s business community in 2006 when he lost the
presidential election by less than a percentage point. He’s
trying to claw his way back into contention in this year’s race
by wooing his old critics.

Out are campaign slogans such as “for the good of Mexico,
the poor come first,” and in are pledges to balance the budget
and protect the central bank’s independence. The candidate who
blockaded Mexico City’s largest business boulevard for weeks to
protest his defeat six years ago, now says he wants to emulate
Brazil’s investor-friendly former President Luiz Inacio Lula da
Silva.

The strategy is having some success, especially among
business leaders in the northern industrial belt hardest hit by
drug violence that has cost 47,000 lives since current President
Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug gangs.

“He’s realized that you can’t fix the world with
socialism,” said Alejandro Gurza, a Ford Motor Co. dealer in
the border state of Coahuila and a former vice president of
Mexico’s car dealership association. “Businessmen were afraid
he would expropriate their property. We realize he’s changed.”

The campaign is taking place as Latin America’s biggest
economy after Brazil is showing resilience amid a global
slowdown. Mexico’s gross domestic product expanded about 4
percent last year and the government expects growth this year to
reach 3.3 percent. The yield on the peso-denominated bond due
2024 has fallen 56 basis points, or 0.56 percentage point, over
the past six months, while the IPC stock index rose 2 percent,
more than every major gauge in the region except Peru’s.

Opinion Poll

Lopez Obrador charged fraud in 2006 when he lost to
Calderon after leading in most polls earlier that year. Now,
less than six months before the July 1 vote, he trails Enrique
Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, by
29 percentage points in the latest Consulta Mitofsky poll.

The former mayor of Mexico City, who heads a coalition
including the Party of the Democratic Revolution, was backed by
16 percent of those surveyed Nov. 21-27 by the Mexico City-based
pollster. Pena Nieto was backed by 45 percent, while Josefina
Vazquez Mota of the ruling National Action Party had 20 percent.
The poll surveyed 1,000 people and had a margin of error of plus
or minus 3.1 percentage points.

“There will be security for all who invest,” the 58-year-old Lopez Obrador said in a brief interview at a Dec. 22 rally
in Mexico City. He has declined repeated requests for a more
extensive interview.

Tainted Party

While Pena Nieto is the candidate to beat, his lead isn’t
insurmountable, said Enrique Krauze, a Mexican historian and
publisher, in an interview from Mexico City.

Pena Nieto, 45, the former governor of Mexico state, must
convince voters that he represents a break from the populism and
corruption that tainted his party during seven decades of
uninterrupted rule until 2000, said Gabriel Casillas, chief
economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Mexico City.

In early campaigning, Pena Nieto has provided ammunition to
critics such as novelist Carlos Fuentes, who said his
“ignorance” made him unfit to run the country.

On Dec. 3, he struggled when asked by journalists at a
literary fair to name three books that influenced him, finally
identifying the Bible and attributing to Krauze another title
written by Fuentes.

A week later, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El
Pais, he didn’t know the price of tortillas, and justified his
lack of knowledge by saying he isn’t “the woman of the
household.” He later said that he was referring to his
“family context” and that the remarks shouldn’t be taken as an
attack on women.

Vazquez Mota

Vazquez Mota, 50, may also climb to challenge Pena Nieto’s
lead if Mexico’s economy continues to weather the European debt
crisis and uncertainty over the strength of growth in the U.S.,
which buys 80 percent of Mexico’s exports.

“Doubling the rate of growth, which we are proposing now,
would permit us, if not to totally satisfy the demand for jobs
in the formal employment market, then to get much closer to
it,” Mota said in a Dec. 29 interview in Mexico City.

Since October, Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, has
met with hundreds of businessmen, swearing not to “take from
the rich” and vowing to convert Mexico into a “loving
republic.” Among his supporters is Alfonso Romo Garza, the
controlling shareholder of Monterrey-based brokerage Vector Casa
de Bolsa SA and a board member of Gruma SAB, the world’s largest
producer of corn and wheat tortillas.

No Ogre

“AMLO for me was an ogre” in 2006, Romo Garza said at a
gathering of business leaders in Monterrey on Oct. 5. “I was
intolerant.”

Lopez Obrador’s pledge to crack down on telecom and other
monopolies won over Fernando Turner Davila, chief executive
officer of Monterrey-based Katcon Global SA, a catalytic
converter producer with facilities in seven countries.

In 2006, the candidate “failed to approach the middle
class and businessmen,” Turner said by phone on Dec. 21. “He’s
corrected that now.”

A spokesman for billionaire Carlos Slim, who controls
America Movil SAB, the Mexico City-based wireless carrier that
has about 70 percent of the market, declined to comment for this
article.

On Nov. 16, Lopez Obrador told the local radio station
Noticias MVS that he’d like to be the Mexican Lula, while saying
each leader has their own characteristics. In two terms as
president, the former union leader helped lift 21 million people
out of poverty, while winning Brazil its first-ever investment
grade credit rating thanks to policies that reduced inflation by
half.

‘Strong Candidate’

“Lopez Obrador’s more moderate discourse definitely makes
him a strong candidate,” Casillas said in a telephone
interview. Still, the election outcome will depend a great deal
on who Calderon’s National Action Party nominates in a Feb. 5
primary, he said.

Many of Lopez Obrador’s newfound business supporters are
from the northern states, where the majority of deaths blamed on
drug violence over the past six years have taken place. Like his
rivals, he’s criticized Calderon’s deployment of the army to
tackle the drug cartels, saying he’d pull troops off the streets
and address the underlying causes of the violence like Mexico’s
poor education system.

Critics such as Krauze say Lopez Obrador’s makeover is a
ploy and that he’s still a danger. They point to his campaign
website, www.gobiernolegitimo.org.mx, which references the
parallel government he created after refusing to recognize
Calderon’s presidency.

Critics

The critics also say his policies are out of step with
Mexico’s economic needs. Lopez Obrador was a leading opponent of
Calderon’s proposal to open up state-run Petroleos Mexicanos to
more private investment, a move that economists say is needed to
revive the country’s oil industry. Output at Pemex slid 21
percent from 2006 to 2010 as crude production slowed at maturing
oil fields, while losses at the company widened to 81 billion
pesos in the third quarter from 2.8 billion the year earlier.

If elected, Lopez Obrador says he’d reduce government
purchases from foreign electricity companies because they charge
high prices, according to a campaign video. He also called in a
video posted to YouTube Oct. 17, 2010, for the “rescue” of
Mexico’s mineral wealth that he says had been illegally given to
mining companies between 1988 and 2006.

His coalition wants the government to take control of half
of the country’s 1.54 trillion-peso ($112 billion) pension
funds, which are managed by companies such as Citigroup Inc.’s
Banamex unit and BBVA Bancomer SA. Lopez Obrador distanced
himself from the proposal in a Dec. 5 video posted on YouTube.

“There will be many people who will believe in Lopez
Obrador,” said the historian Krauze, who coined the term
“Tropical Messiah” to describe the candidate in a 2006 essay.
“He is no longer on the attack, he’s meeting with businessmen.
But I think his concrete ideas haven’t changed.”